Black Lines in Thumbnails of Colour

February 8, 2022

 

Last week I felt light, like a falling snowflake, a spinning dancer. Last week I felt I’d walked a few steps forwards. I even tackled four of the six tasks on my financial stuff to-do list. It felt like a moment of victory—of being ‘productive’, efficient, useful—of conquering sloth, and fear. I don’t know how one gets from there to here in one swift slide.

 

Today I am, once again, acutely aware of the mountain of things under the concrete I walk on. The uncertainties, the things beyond my control—those things that I have understood are unresolvable, unpredictable in the current situation. I need visits to India to clear them. I choose to not give them mental space, so they creep under the ground I walk on making each step wobbly. They grow, stay stagnant, and grow more—never diminishing in size by even a cubic millimeter. I fall on them all lumpy and tired. I turn and turn like a dog trying to find a comfortable position. I feel like the princess, lying on a pea covered by a dozen mattresses. I finally doze. I dream of running away from assassins and all the undone things, the long list of them, begin falling on me like a rain of stones. I am sandwiched. Tired I give up. 

 

I read five books in January and barely ten pages in February. The inconsistency chomps at me. After every five or six days of good work, I drop into a ‘void’ day where nothing works, nothing feels right, nothing moves—or it does but in weighty backward way. I lie in bed at night glad that the day is over and worry, but what if tomorrow is the same. I’ve begun to cope by drawing these disturbances with a black fine liner in thumbnails of solid colour. It's soothing to pick a colour and block out a square in my journal. Expressing the disturbance within the box, frees me a bit from its grasp.  Yesterday I drew nine boxes—lime green, pale yellow, sky blue, leaf green, bright orange, eggplant purple, rose pink, sea blue, soft lilac. 

 

I crawled out of that yesterday into today and found that I began ticking my to-do list again. Relief. 

 

The inconsistency bothers me. It leaves gaps in what I can expect of myself. It obscures the full picture and that makes me nervous. It’s hard to keep doing when I don’t know where everything fits. 

 

But there is not much to do about it, I realize. Fighting it makes it worse. Planning a faffing day never works. The only thing that seems to work is to allow everything to collapse on such a day and trust that it will be one or two, not many. 

 

This is life right now. It’s not been this way before the dreaded C-thing happened. Again, I blame it. Will I ever stop? Will it ever stop? Will I ever adapt to this unnatural normal? 

 

It’s the same lesson as last week in a different form. The slow crawl, with moments of joyous leaping and others of content catnapping. Today I will also add Sanchin and gin and tonics to my coping strategies. Advise from one of my Sensei’s. This story I will tell another time.

 

People all over the world are doing kata and push-up challenges this month. Time to throw myself into that energy.